Abstract

Interactive problem solving environments are gaining widespread acceptance within the Grid community. While developing applications and frameworks to support and to integrate with these interactive environments is very important, it is also necessary to treat the legacy applications with the same importance. In this paper, we report an ongoing effort in enabling a legacy application to support, integrate with, and evolve as a scalable problem solving environment for Earth system modelling. Our strategy has been to componentise the existing legacy framework, augment each component with metadata, and using this metadata address different issues arising when performing component composition. We describe the means for specifying, publishing, and using the metadata in solving two different but crucially important issues when performing component composition – model validation and model efficiency.